How much work a forum is to maintain will depend largely on the nature of your business, & the kinds of people who are likely to use your products. I was part of the admin team of a busy (10k+ members) forum for a UK based game developer for about 3 years, and at times, especially around releases, or when a game was waiting for a patch, it was a lot of work to keep things calm & generally as tidy and family-friendly as a corporate site should be.
Still that was the games industry & a large part of our user base were teens, who aren't always the most reasonable or co-operative people. Id imagine that most other areas of business wouldn't have so many unruly customers, so keeping a forum clean and tidy probably wouldn't be as much work.

I'd absolutely say that a forum can be a very useful way for a business to interact with it's customers, but only if a company representative is going to be able to take to the time to keep an eye on things, deal with questions & provide customer feedback. If you don't think you're going to be able to use the forum like that, it might actually be counter-productive to have one, since if you aren't going to have the time to engage with your customers through it you may just come across as if you don't care enough to bother.
Just my tuppence _________________Looking for UK Jobs?

Forums are potential moneymakers if they really take off but the reality is that only a very, very select few truly 'make it'. (Sadly this isn't one of those cases. ) I think what forums do offer, however, is the opportunity to network with others on a first-hand basis. Obviously, you can achieve this by just being a forum member also, though, but the opportunities are perhaps made easier (maybe because you will spend more time there than most) if you are the admin.

As to whether it's worth the work, that's kind of hard to measure really, and answers to that question will no doubt vary from one admin to another.

I think as with most things, there are pro's and con's. A community forums could be potentially very useful with regard to getting feedback from customers in order to improve your service and many members are often quite outspoken and are not afraid to tell you if something needs improving. So in terms of developing your business and getting feedback in order to guage whether what you are currently doing is working - then yes they can be worth it. The con's would probably relate most to the amount of time it would take to manage your forums, as if you build up a substantial membership number the amount of threads to monitor could become overwelming and you will always have to deal with people either bad mouthing you or trying to make adverts on your site (i.e spam). I think you need to weigh these things up and decide whether the rewards are worth the time you are going to have to invest in this project.

If you are working on Building your business everyday, there is no boss, you can not get fired. And a cool thing, you can pass that business down for generations, generation to generation.

if you work, you can't pass your position down. Even the greatest jobs in the world: Doctors lawyers, Architects

A doctor can't make his son a doctor just cause? Their kids would have to go to college for 10 years just to be eligable to have a similar position. And a business, you can arrange so that it works for you while you are not around._________________Real Estate Contract

Starting your own business from scratch gives you the leeway of doing everything your own way...but you've also got to struggle through all of the decisions regarding products/services to offer, naming, and pricing all on your own.

So, it really all depends on how much business ownership latitude you REALLY want._________________REO Properties

it will probably help in letting you advertise well and probably hear alot of points of views about experienced people when it comes to this field which is a great recomendation in order for you get more experience_________________business for sale

Why should running your own business forum stop you from enjoying vacation time? Now that we are in an age of mobile internet, there's no reason why you can't juggle other responsibilities with things that you enjoy. You need to get along to the Aardvark Travel forum...

well because you run the business and you have to take care of stuff when no one can because your the most person who knows whats right from wrong and the best playmaker in the company_________________business for sale

I t has many benefits, you will have more traffic from search engines, users will create contents for your, your website will be always fresh with new content.
But, it is very hard to lead a successful forum , usually you would like to cover as many topics as possible in your forum in order to reach broader audience, it is unlikely for you to be expert in each topic, so you have to attract experts to your forum to answer questions, if you can do that you will see the success in short time. Usually that is very hard, thats why people offering pay per post or other benefits like "ants" in this forum. So the real question is how you can attract and benefit experts , active yours on your forum.

i beg to differ with all of you around. i think startuing a forum related to your niche is a tough job, the worst part is when you are trying to make your forum stand there would be loads of spammers & bots to kill your forum,, it is huge investment in terms of time and money!_________________incorporate online | WD External Hard Drive